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Newsletter of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz

Issue CLIII: March 2021

This is the 153rd issue of the Newsletter published by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz. It covers informations about the plans of the members of the department in March 2021 as well as short reports about events, presentations, etc. in February 2021.

Events at/by the Department

The project The Multilingual Mind together with Bilingualism Matters organized interactive online events on "Multilingualism: myths, facts, research, and stories” in Dutch, English, Greek, German, and Polish on the International Mothertongue Day, 21st February 2021.

The Lecture series The Multilingual Mind: lecture series on multilingualism across disciplines started on 3rd November 2020 and will run this year online via Zoom on Tuesday from 17.00-18.30. The speakers will present research findings on multilingualism across different disciplines, in line with the MultiMind project (linguistics, education, psychology, neuroscience, speech & language pathology). The lecture series is aimed at everyone interessted in Multilingualism. The dates, list of presentations, and Zoom link can be found here.

Department and Research Colloquium in February

4.2 Charles Yang Discovery Procedure and the Scope of Linguistic Explanation

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

in March

  • Marieke Einfeldt, Angelika Golegos, Kaja Gregorc and Monika Lindauer are giving a talk Frühkindliche Sprachentwicklung und Mehrsprachigkeit (early language development and multilingualism) for the Tagesmütterverein Landkreis Konstanz on March 3rd.
     
  •  On March 5th Tamara Rathcke is giving a talk at the Sorbonne University: Is language rhythm in the ear of the beholder? A sensorimotor synchronisation approach to the cross-linguistic study of rhythm.
     
  • Anika Lloyd-Smith is presenting a talk entitled L3 English in Italian-German bilinguals: Comparing accent with syntax at the AAAL 2021 Virtual Conference, 20th-23rd March 2021, in Georgia.
     
  • Anika Lloyd-Smith, Henrik Gyllstad and Tanja Kupisch are presenting a poster entitled Lexical proficiency as a measure of language vitality in North Sámi at the digital XVIII International Conference on Minority Languages, 24-26 March, in Bilbao.
     
  • Bettina Braun will give a keynote talk on Using imitation and meaning tasks to tap into the (phonological) status of pitch accents at the Münster conference on linguistic representations and language processing, which takes place March 25th to March 27th (https://www.uni-muenster.de/Promotionskolleg-Sprachwissenschaft/Aktuelles/lirlap/index.html).

in February

  • Regine Eckardt presented at the Biased Questions Workshop, held at the Leibniz-ZAS Berlin on February 4th and 5th, 2021. The talk Pedagogical Questions in Old English: The case of Boethius presents joint work by Regine Eckardt and George Walkden.
     
  • Anja Arnhold, Bettina Braun & Maribel Romero gave a talk at the workshop "Biased Questions: Experimental Results & Theoretical Modelling” on Feb, 4th-5th. Their talk was on Bias in English and German negative polar questions.
     
  • Laura González López and Andreas Trotzke gave a talk on ¡Mira! La interfaz gramático-informativa en la periferia izquierda española at the Center for Theoretical Linguistics (CLT) Barcelona on February 17th.
     
  • Tanja Kupisch was invited speaker at the RUEG Conference - Dynamics of Language Contact, New Perspectives on Emerging Grammars, Variation and Change in Berlin (February 21st to 23rd, 2021).
     
  • Grazia Di Pisa was as well at the RUEG Conference - Dynamics of Language Contact, New Perspectives on Emerging Grammars, Variation and Change in Berlin and presented on Monday 22nd February. Her talk was on Gender Agreement in Italian Heritage Speakers: Effects of Markedness and Proficiency. You can find the program here.
     
  • Also George Walkden was at the RUEG Conference - Dynamics of Language Contact, New Perspectives on Emerging Grammars, Variation and Change in Berlin and presented on Tuesday 23rd February. His talk, with Kari Kinn (Bergen), was on Investigating Historical Heritage Languages: Possessives in Norn. You can find the program here.
     
  • Andreas Trotzke and Adriana Hanulíková organized a workshop on Sprache & Kognition: Aktuelle Forschung für die Sprachdidaktik/DGfS-Lehramtsinitiative at the DGfS 2021 conference (U Freiburg) on February 23rd. One of the speakers was our dear colleague Theo Marinis.
     
  • Theo Marinis together with Konstantina Olioumsevits (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) gave the talk Multilingualism and Language Education: findings from projects in the UK & Greece and implications for the German context at the workshop on “Sprache & Kognition: Aktuelle Forschung für die Sprachdidaktik/DGfS-Lehramtsinitiative” at the DGfS 2021 conference (U Freiburg) on February 23rd organised by Andreas Trotzke and Adriana Hanulíková.
     
  • Anamaria Bentea and Theo Marinis presented a poster Cross-linguistic Influence in the Production of Multiple wh-Questions at the RUEG Conference - Dynamics of Language Contact, New Perspectives on Emerging Grammars, Variation and Change in Berlin on February 23rd.
     
  • Svenja Schmid and Georg A. Kaiser presented a poster On word order variation and information structure in Spanish and Italian ‘why’-interrogatives at the 46th Incontro di Grammatica Generativa (IGG46) which took place online/at the University of Siena, February 23th-26th.

More News

  • We are very pleased to inform that following Konstanz linguists are active at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (Linguistic Society of Germany):

    Miriam Butt was elected Chair of the Executive committee of the DGfS at this year's annual meeting. At the same meeting, Geroge Walkden was elected into the 2022 program committee and Nicole Dehé joined the editorial team of the society’s journal, the Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft. Andreas Trotzke continues on as an elected member of the advisory board.
     
  • Diego Frassinelli and Gabriella Lapesa (IMS, University of Stuttgart) organized the Computational Linguistics Tutorial at the DGfS 2021 conference (University of Freiburg). The title of the tutorial is: Friendly Distributional Semantics: from theory to practice.
     
  • Congratulations to Anamaria Bentea who has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship funded by the EU within Horizon 2020 to conduct research on Processing and Production in Heritage Speakers: The Role of Disambiguating Cues in collaboration with Theo Marinis and Tanja Kupisch. The project will start in September 2021.
     
  • The Second Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning Workshop (NALOMA’21), organised by Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli and Larry Moss, was accepted and will be organised as part of the 14th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS) 2021. The entire conference will be held online. NALOMA’21 invites submissions on all theoretical and computational aspects of Natural Language Inference and Natural Logic. For more information, visit https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/naloma21/
     
  • Ramona Baumgartner (Linguistics) and Dr. Elisabeth Maué (Wirtschaftspädagogik) received a Tandem-Fellowship by the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung in the last round of their joint funding initiative together with the Stifterverband "Fellowships für Innovation in der Hochschullehre". The interdisciplinary project aims to develop a digital teaching tool to prepare teachers for their digital and face-to-face teaching experiences in linguistically heterogenous classrooms. The project will start in March and over the next five semesters the tool will be developed and implemented in practical scenarios through joint student partnerships with the aim of its transfer and application in other teacher education courses. You can find a press release by the University with further links about the project here.
     
  • We are very glad to announce that Prof. Maribel Romero, together with Prof. Wataru Uegaki (co-PI, Univ. Edinburgh) and Dr. Floris Roelofsen (co-I, Univ. Amsterdam) has been awarded a project titled A cross-linguistic investigation of meaning-driven combinatorial restrictions on clausal embedding, jointly founded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
     
  • Congratulations to Alexandra Rehn who receives funding by the Young Scholar Fund for the preparation, evaluation and visualisation of Alemannic data, focussing on possessive constructions.
     
  • Annette Hautli-Janisz is PI in a new project, Deliberation Laboratory (DeLab), funded in the AI and the Society of the Future call by the VolkswagenStiftung, from 04/2021 for four years. The project aims to develop a transformative online experimentation environment that will allow us to explore the nature, causes, and consequences of citizens’ perceptions in public, online dialogue across languages. Involved sites are the University of Goettingen (PolSci), the University of Dundee (CompSci), the Warsaw University of Technology (Philosophy) and the University of Amsterdam (PolSci).

    In a Memorandum of Understanding, Annette Hautli-Janisz has started a cooperation with Roberta Facchinetti, Silvia Cavalieri and Sara Corrizzato from the University of Verona, Italy, on understanding the role of questions in political interviews. Verona will mostly be involved in the syntactic and semantic annotation of the data, the Konstanz site pairs up with Biljana Scott in understanding and coding speaker intention.

Publications by Members of the Department

  • Miriam Butt and Ida Toivonen edited the LFG20 Proceedings, which are now on-line at CSLI Publications.
     
  • Butt, Miriam, Rajamathangi, S. and Sarveswaran, Kengatharaiyer. Mixed Categories in Tamil via Complex Categories. In M. Butt and I. Toivonen (eds.) Proceedings of the LFG'20 Conference, 68-88. CSLI Publications. (online access)
     
  • Laura González López & Andreas Trotzke. 2021. ¡Mira! The grammar-attention interface in the Spanish left periphery. The Linguistic Review. Ahead-of-Print. (online access)
     
  • Di Pisa, G., Soares, S. M. P., & Rothman, J. 2021. Brain, mind and linguistic processing insights into the dynamic nature of bilingualism and its outcome effects. “Journal of Neurolinguistics”, 58, 100965.
     
  • Bayram, F., Rothman, J., Di Pisa, G., & Slabakova, R. (2020). Current trends and emerging methodologies in charting heritage language bilingual grammars. In Montrul, S. and Polinsky, M. (Eds.) (in progress and under contract). “The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics. Cambridge,” UK: Cambridge University Press.
     
  • Patra, A., Bose, A. and Marinis, T. (2021). Semantic context effects in monolingual and bilingual speakers. “Journal of Neurolinguistics”, 57. (online access)
     
  • Bentea, A. and Marinis, T. (forthcoming) Not all wh-dependencies are created equal: processing of multiple wh-dependencies in Romanian children and adults. Applied Psycholinguistics.
     
  • Czypionka, Anna, Maribel Romero and Josef Bayer. 2021. Question-sensitive discourse particles at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics – an experimental approach. "Glossa: a journal of general linguistics" 5(1): 24. 1–34. DOI. (online access)
     
  • Vihman, Virve-Anneli, & George Walkden. 2021. Verb-second in spoken and written Estonian. “Glossa: a journal of general linguistics” 6(1): 15, 1-23. (online access)
     
  • Westergaard, M. & T. Kupisch. 2021. Stable and vulnerable domains in Germanic Heritage Languages. In Kristin Hagen, Arnstein Hjelde, Karine Stjernholm & Øystein A. Vangsnes (eds), Bauta: Janne B. Johannesen in Memoriam, 503-527 [Oslo Studies in Language 11(2)]
     
  • Kupisch, T., S. Pereira Soares, E. Puig Mayenco & J. Rothman. 2021. Multilingualism and Chomsky’s Generative Grammar In Edited by Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey. Blackwell Companion to Chomsky. JohnWiley & Sons, Inc, 232-242.
     
  • Kupisch, T. 2021 Heritage Languages in Europe. In S. Montrul & M. Polinsky (eds). The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, 45-68.
     
  • Kupisch, T., Mitrofanova, N. & M. Westergaard. forthcoming. The role of phonological vs. semantic gender cues in the acquisition of German by simultaneous and sequential bilinguals (German-Russian) Journal of Child Language.
     
  • Bögel, Tina and Lea Rach. 2020. Swabian ed and edda: Negation at the interfaces. In “Proceedings of the LFG20 conference, online conference”. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
     
  • Andreas Trotzke & Laia Mayol. 2021. Catalan focus markers as discourse particles. Journal of Linguistics. First View.

Acquisitions of the Library

  • Kaiser, Georg A.: Syntax des Französischen: Einführung und Vertiefung
  • Bybee, Joan L.: Complex sentences in grammar and discourse: essays in honor of Sandra A. Thompson
  • Ihsane, Tabea: Linguistics; (2020) Volume 58
  • Gussenhoven, Carlos: The Oxford handbook of language prosody
  • Mittell, Jason: Genre and television: from cop shows to cartoons in American culture
  •  Bauer, Matthias: Linguistics meets literature: more on the grammar of Emily Dickinson
  • Sánchez López, Cristina: Las modalidades oracionales
  • Stark, Elisabeth: Romanische Syntax im Wandel [Wulf Oesterreicher ... gewidmet]
  • Baldi, Sergio: Dictionary of Arabic loanwords in the languages of Central and East Africa
  • Assenzi, Lucia Fruchtbringende Verdeutschung: Linguistik und kulturelles Umfeld der Übersetzung des "Novellino" (1572) in den "Erzehlungen aus den mittlern Zeiten" (1624)
  • Presse und Sprache; 64. Jahrgang (2020)
  • Jahrestagung des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache <56., 2020, Mannheim> Deutsch in Europa: sprachpolitisch - grammatisch - methodisch
  • Französisch heute; 51. Jahrgang (2020)
  • L'Italia dialettale; Volume 81 = Serie 3, 17 (2020)
  • Lingua nostra; Volume 79 (2018)
  • Studi di filologia italiana; Volume 78 (2020)
  • Zeitschrift für Katalanistik; Vol. 31. 32. und 33.
  • Suvremena lingvistika; Godina 46, Svezak 1 = Broj 89
  • Zeitschrift für arabische Linguistik; Vol. 71 und 72(2020)

Photo copyright: by Wolfgang Dirscherl/pixelio.de